InRule Update 2015

I last got an update on InRule back in 2014 when I was updated on 4.6. Catching up with them recently I got a company and product update. They continue to focus on healthcare (insurance and delivery), insurance, banking and government. Some of their new customers are using InRule with Microsoft Dynamics CRM as part of a general move to seeing more business linked to a CRM system. They still see lots of project-oriented adoption but a growing minority are thinking in terms of platform adoption. On the public sector side they are also extending and developing their SI and other partners while their OEM business continues to be strong. Integrations with Dynamic CRM, Salesforce and K2 are also driving strong business for them.

From a product roadmap perspective the next release is focused on JavaScript execution and easy cloud deployment. This has been driven by enterprise mobile developers trying to replace laptops with tablets and provide a disconnected mode for their apps as well as by enterprise web developers trying to support complex web forms by embedding some of the rules in these forms directly in the browser.

In the next release the business rules are still written and managed in irAuthor as before. The new capability generates JavaScript for these rules so they can be embedded. This generates a very responsive environment without having to code the rules a second time in JavaScript. These rules will work off line also and will automatically update when the application re-connects. A rule application consisting of several rulesets or decision tables can be selected in irAuthor and then a service generates them as a JavaScript file. Each ruleset of decision table can be marked as an explicit executable or the whole application can be executed. The JavaScript needs to create an XML or JSON object and then invoke the InRule function against it. Rules in irAuthor can be deployed only as JavaScript, as .Net components or both.

The next release will also provide some ease of use improvements for InRule on Azure and the catalog manager will move to a web-based environment that supports cloud deployments. The new version is expected to ship later this year.